Tuesday, June 13, 2017

a lot of systems work in computer science is about virtualisation, which is basically the way to hide details of gritty reality from people (programmers) and processes. so plato spoke about us witnessing the universe as if sitting in a cave by the fire trying to work out how the cosmos works via shadows on the wall. a lot of hacking is like this.

a lot of security and usability is about trying to make a computer that interacts with you like a real person. to make the machine a ghost, at least, partially convincing. we now even find ourselves trying to convince computers that we are not machines. we, the cpu god creators, are now failing to live up to our own creation's expectations.